With the advent of new technologies and continual improvements, the use of medical devices in the operating room has increasingly become more technically complex and increasingly requires more precise operation by the surgeons using the devices. Therefore, various systems for centrally controlling a plurality of medical devices in an operating room have been suggested.
It is generally known to use a central unit to control various medical devices, which can include anything from insufflators, pumps, pressure gauges, lasers, HF instruments, endoscopic lights and cameras, x-ray or ultrasound machines, other image or video recording machines, other illuminating devices, or even a printer, a pager, a telephone, or the operating table itself. One such system uses a self-configuring bus capable of interconnecting a large number of devices to the central unit as a way to centrally control various medical devices in an operating room with a single device. These surgical networks, such as that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,397,286, which is assigned to the assignee of the present application and which is incorporated herein by reference, may include, for example, a CAN bus monitored by a controller or master device and automatically configured thereby when a particular device connected to the bus is removed from the network, added to the network, or loses power. Such buses permit individual devices to be added or removed from the network without interfering with the operation of the other devices. Additionally, these buses allow a greater number of devices to be used during an individual surgical procedure.
However, one disadvantage of such systems is that the bus does not transmit data as quickly as is sometimes required. The primary purpose of such a bus is to control the devices that the bus interconnects, not the transmission of data generally. Therefore, systems employing CAN or similar buses do not efficiently facilitate the transmission of large amounts of data. However, surgical networks of the kind described above often employ devices that require rapid transmission of large amounts of data, such as, for example, a video camera, which transmits video data back to the central unit and/or a monitor. This data, which can be reproduced as a video image, and can thereby be used to assist with the control of other devices, amounts to a significant amount of information that systems employing CAN or similar buses are not able to efficiently transmit.
Another disadvantage of using a bus such as a CAN or similar bus is that not all of the devices that a surgeon may desire to use during a particular procedure are compatible. As previously noted, there are countless devices that a surgeon may wish to have at his disposal during a particular procedure, and these devices may each be compatible with different bus or network types. Accordingly, it is very likely that a particular surgeon will want to use a medical device that is not compatible with the particular bus or network that is available in his surgical environment.
What is desired, therefore, is a system and method for controlling a plurality of medical devices in which large amounts of data can be transmitted quickly. What is further desired is a system and method for controlling a plurality of medical devices in which certain devices that are not compatible with the first surgical network, or are compatible with a second surgical network, can still be centrally controlled along with the devices of the first surgical network.